Woman seated on a kitchen stool with colourful botanical tattoos on her thigh and lower leg and ankle.

Botanical leg tattoos on a seated woman

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A woman with long straight black hair sits on a kitchen counter and holds a white mug, wearing a white crop top and white shorts. Her head is cropped out of the frame. Her thigh and lower leg carry colour tattoos with green and red foliage-like shapes, with shading visible on the calf. The warm kitchen setting and the bright green pouch on the counter fill the background.

Botanical Thigh Calf Ankle Leaves Foliage Flower Woman

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The greenhouse at Cold Harbour smelled of wet clay and dead tomato leaves, and nobody had opened the door since the February frost. I found Nan's ledger on the potting bench under a tin of twine, its spine held together with washing-line string. Every page listed a cutting: the date, the parent plant, where it had gone. Most entries were in pencil, and some were crossed out and written over.

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The last page had one line, underlined twice. Red-stem vine, from the wall at Bexley. Keep it warm. Don't let it dry out, Tom. She had written my name as if she knew I would be the one to come. The vine itself was a tangle behind the water butt, its leaves green on top and rusty red underneath, the colour of brick that has been rained on for years. Its new shoots were the colour of a fire going out.

I cut a length with the bread knife, because the secateurs had rusted shut, and sat on the back step for an hour wondering whether a dead woman's instructions still counted. Then I filled a jam jar from the kettle's cooled water, stood the stem in it, and set the jar on her kitchen windowsill, where the morning sun comes in sideways over the sink.

Four days later a single leaf unfolded at the tip, pale green edged in red, like a page someone had turned too early. I wrote the date beneath her last entry, and in the margin, in pencil, I added one more line: cutting one, rooted.